Streets of Fire is like a feature-length Jim Steinman music video (admittedly not that big of a stretch), which makes all the sense in the world considering the singer/songwriter's cinematic bent. Steinman penned the opening and closing songs (one of which is the anthem “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young”), while the score is a Ry Cooder leftover from another movie (and you could certainly do a lot worse than that). To no one’s surprise, the music is by far the best thing about the film (making me wish it was a musical proper).
The film opens with Ellen Aim and the Attackers in concert performing “Nowhere Fast.” Never mind the unfortunate band name; Ellen looks and sounds great thanks to Diane Lane’s stage presence and Laurie Sargent’s and Holly Sherwood’s voices. The show comes to an untimely end when the Bombers, a motorcycle gang led by Raven Shaddock (Willem Dafoe), crash the party and kidnap Ellen.
Raven absconds with Ellen to the Battery, a part of town the police don't dare go to; thus, Billy Fish (Moranis), Ellen's boyfriend/manager, offers Tom Cody (Michael Paré) $10,000 to rescue her — Billy doesn't know it yet, but Tom is Ellen's ex. The two are joined by McCoy (Amy Madigan), a tough girl with little tolerance for assholes.
Once again, the action plays out like an MTV montage, but this is a deliberate aesthetic choice. The sets are elaborate and detailed but nonetheless clealy sets, and the actors’ look perfectly reflects the characters that have been assigned to them, which is very convenient because what we see is exactly what we get.
Moranis, and this is also unsurprising, makes the most of his dialogue; he has to constantly look up to make eye contact with his interlocutors, but at the same time he invariably talks down to them. “I don't know what's more pathetic, the way you talk or the way you dress,” McCoy tells him — and since Billy is supposed to be pathetic, he also not only looks but also sounds exactly the way he's supposed to. As for Dafoe, with his leather fetish and Misfits hairdo, he endows Raven with a sort of teenage Count Orlok quality.
The only real disappointment is Paré, and by extension, the romance between Tom and Ellen. We don't know what they see in each other other than their both physically attractive (which means that her relationship with Billy is actually built on a potentially more lasting foundation), and we don't care whether or not they end up together.
Moreover, there linger some hard feelings between the two, but that doesn’t justify the movie’s one truly WTF moment. We’re all familiar with that cliché that sees the protagonist knock his sidekick out, ironically to prevent the latter from 'getting hurt' when all hell breaks loose; however, this is the only film I can think of wherein the supposed hero puts his fist through the face of the woman he supposedly loves.
It’s true that Ellen behaves like a spoiled bitch when she finds out that her ex-boyfriend had the audacity to charge her current boyfriend for saving her life when even the police couldn’t be bothered to do something, but the whole thing is still uncalled for, and the fact that she, this essentially being a live-action cartoon, looks no worse for wear once she regains consciousness, just makes it worse — as if violence against women were a victimless crime.
Joke’s on Billy, though; he’s the one left stuck with a famous girlfriend who sings longingly in public about the guy who toyed with her emotionally and assaulted her physically; on the other hand, as a manager he probably feels much less bad about collecting his 10%.
